Essence in Practice

It is now one year since the official adoption of the OMG ESSENCE standard and we are now arranging the first conference on ‘Essence in Practice'.

We are inviting abstracts for presentations for the first Essence conference on June 18th, 2015 – co-located with the next OMG meeting. The conference will take place in the Radisson Blu Hotel, in Berlin, Germany We are in particular soliciting presentations on experiences with the use of Essence in practice with topics as follows.

Essence in industry practices and experience reports

Essence in courses and industrial training

Tooling developments of Essence practices

Domain applications of Essence, such as system engineering, business engineering, and project managements etc.

Please send us an email with an abstract and your bio for your presentation at the conference by April 8th, 2015. Email: semat-feedback@paluno.uni-due.de

This talk shows how Scrum project management practice can be described using Essence kernel and language. The proposed steps of mapping the Scrum practice to Essence kernel and language are generally applicable to other practices. Practical benefits of using Essence as a common foundation for defining software engineering practices are demonstrated. These practical benefits include the ability to compare practices, assess potential gaps, make needed practice improvements, and assemble select practices into a coherent method to benefit the project team. In addition, by providing practical checklists, as opposed to conceptual discussions, the Essence-powered practice becomes something the team uses on a daily basis. This is a fundamental difference from traditional approaches, which tend to overemphasize method description as opposed to method use. It is also shown that the Essence-to-practice mapping helps automating the health monitoring of project states and the adaptive planning of project activities.

The software world has got a rigorous foundation – the Essence standard – on top of which light and elegant practices can be built – designed for reuse when composing methods and designed to be easily adopted and improved by teams. This means that teams can now be empowered to construct their own methods from a library of common practices. The future is already here. Companies are building their practice libraries. We will present a practice library with around 30 practices built on Essence, and many more are in the pipeline. Welcome to the future!

Since the technology behind the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet isn't particularly new — it's essentially the convergence of low-cost computing power, omnipresent connectivity, Big Data and real-time, predictive analysis — the methodologies that have been used for decades still work. But there will be additional focus on distributed failure modes, replication, and prediction that should be reflected in updates to those methodologies. Most important is that every mayor player will need a multitude of methods such as traditional methods and agile methods, methods for simple apps or methods for complex system of systems, methods for distributed systems, systems with extreme real-time requirement, transaction-based systems, mobile systems, big data management, systems in cloud, and methods already used in business, telecom, defense, airlines, etc. This is where one of OMG's most important standards, ESSENCE, comes in — the ability to "map" methodologies as collections of practices, and connect those practices across different development processes and groups becomes absolutely critical. Though the IoT isn't about methodology, industrial strength IoT requires industrial strength methodologies, which points to the ESSENCE standard.

Dr. Soley will introduce the Industrial Internet and the Industrial Internet Consortium, and discuss how the ESSENCE standard will support the development of Industrial Internet solutions.

Red Hat is a fast-changing company where people drive constant improvements. We connect a global community of enterprises, partners, and developers, co-creating technologies that are more innovative than what any one of us could have created alone. Creativity, inventiveness, and collaboration are all part of the way we do business. Red Hat's wide product portfolio covering infrastructure, middleware, cloud and emerging technologies, coupled with a diverse range of customers, has led to a medley of disparate, and ever-evolving, practices and methods. But that's OK. It's important for us to become collaborative partners with our customers; to meet their needs, and deliver to their aspirations; our ways of working need to align with what works best for them, and serve their requirements. In this talk we will look at how SEMAT helps Red Hat manage this assortment of approaches; how it provides a consistent view across all projects irrespective of the approach taken, even if SEMAT was not considered during project initiation. Furthermore, we will look at how SEMAT is helping Red Hat patch the holes in existing approaches, and providing a framework for developing new practices to support evolving techniques, and emerging technologies.

1100 – 1130

Using Essence to Deliver Together – Practical Experience at FujitsuSlides of the PresentationSte Nadin, Chief Architect, Business and Application Services, Fujitsu Services

We currently live in an disruptive age where the standard industry processes and thinking are constantly being challenged. This disruption is changing the ways Fujitsu customers are looking to engage and the manner that Fujitsu has to respond to deliver end to end solutions. It is therefore becoming more vital than ever that a common and firm foundation can be used to act as the anchor point to deliver successfully. SEMAT is this anchor point. In this presentation we want to explore how Essence from practical experience has been used to allow successful delivery. This will look at instances where both Fujitsu has worked in partnership with customers as well as different parts of Fujitsu with different methods delivering in a unified manner. This will look at the challengers overcome and the opportunities further down the line.

This presentation will show a tool environment to support Essence-based method enactment, which is under development by uEngine Solutions. It will be demonstrated how practitioners can use the tool to define software engineering practices using Essence kernel and compose them into a method, and how the method is enacted and the project state is monitored across distributed teams. A good news is this tool is provided as an open source and as-a-service.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology has now been teaching ESSENCE on the bachelor's degree level for four years. It started in 2012. At that time, ESSENCE was still in its cradle. The alphas and its checklists were in a final polishing state and there were neither any teaching materials nor any other pedagogical tools for utilizing ESSENCE. This presentation gives a historical account of the four-year education of ESSENCE at the bachelor's degree level at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The presentation includes the following topics: (1) tackling lack of educational material, (2) development and evolution of educational material throughout the four years, (3) students, their performance and attitude towards ESSENCE, (4) lessons learned of teaching ESSENCE (5), and finally, (6) suggestions for how to transfer the lessons learned from the academic to the industrial educational context.

"Could you please describe how an endeavor in application development progresses over time in a healthy way?" In 2010 Munich Re's application development department was asked this question. But as simple as the question may sound, it is as hard to answer. Even more so in a group of people with different views and experiences. One of the big challenges is the lack of a common language to allow the group to discuss, share and compare their ways of working. The ESSENCE standard provides definitions and tools to overcome this challenge: it enables efficient discussions about a way of working, the identification of the essential elements that teams should share, the sharing of practices and processes, and the unambiguous documentation of defined ways of working. In this manner ESSENCE was successfully utilized at Munich Re to define a common way of working for all endeavors. This presentation describes the issues Munich Re faced in their initial failed attempts to discuss a way of working by mainly referring to work products, the breakthroughs made by utilizing ESSENCE, and the benefits brought to Munich Re by the resulting ESSENCE-based way of working.

1340 – 1410

Experiences with the use of Essence at the Federal Government in BrazilSlides of the PresentationVinicius Silva, Ministry of Planning, Budgeting and Management of Brazil

This presentation will report on experiences on the use of Essence for the governmental Software Development Process called Solutions Delivery Process (PES) in Brazil. The Solutions Delivery Process (PES) is a Scaled Disciplined Agile Software Development Process that has been described, enacted and disseminated in the Ministry of Planning, Budgeting and Management of Brazil since 2013. In this talk/presentation Vinicius will show how The Essence and its Kernel has been used recently to describe, enact and disseminate PES so that it could have an easier and consistent adoption in other Brazilian federal government organizations

Essence has provided an important step forward in re-founding Software Engineering. However, it is important to provide complementary steps forward in Systems Engineering, particularly since software has become the most prominent element of modern systems. To meet this need, Ivar Jacobson and Harold "Bud" Lawson decided to edit a book to illuminate various perspectives concerning system aspects to be considered in Software Engineering. Several well known Software Engineering and Systems Engineering experts have provided their perspectives. Of particular importance is a Call to Action to work towards a Systems Engineering version of Essence aimed at unification and leading to improved communication and understanding between the disciplines. In this presentation, highlights of the book will be presented as well as some ideas related to requirements for a Systems Engineering Essence.

1440 – 1500

Extending Essence for Business and Service Engineering – with Symphonical Tool SupportSlides of the PresentationArne J. Berre, Chief Scientist, SINTEF Brian Elvesæter, Research Scientist, SINTEF

The Essence kernel is a suitable foundation not only for software engineering, but also for business and service engineering. This presentation shows how popular business engineering practices like business model canvasing and service engineering practices like service journey mapping can be supported by an extension to the Essence kernel. The presentation will also illustrate how the dynamic enactment of Essence practices can be supported by the "SomeOne" team collaboration tool provided by the Symphonical team collaboration platform.

1500 – 1530

Afternoon Refreshments

1530 – 1600

FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

1530 – 1600

AFTERNOON KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: The Future of Software Engineering – as Seen with SEMAT GlassesSlides of the PresentationIvar Jacobson, Founder, Ivar Jacobson International

The first step of the SEMAT community has been reached: a common ground, a kernel, a foundation including universal elements for all software development endeavors has been created in the form of the Essence standard. What comes next? Existing successful practices will be translated into the Essence superlight format and practice libraries will be built. This work has already started but much more is planned for the future. New (and old) methods will be composed from reusable proven practices, for instance practices focusing on doing instead of describing; scaling to large systems of systems and large programs of programs; used to form method starter packs for new domains such as Internet of Things; transforming organizations from primarily relying on software development as a craft to relying on it as an engineering discipline; supported by intelligent agents to guide the developers with the no-brain work (the standard patterns of work) prevalent in most practices This will if successful fundamentally change the way organizations will develop software. It will be better, faster, cheaper and with happier customers. Let's make it successful.

1600 – 1700

PANEL DISCUSSION

1600 – 1700

Succeeding with Essence in PracticePanel with the industrial speakers

The final panel will discuss recommendations for succeeding with Essence in practice, based on the experiences of the industrial speakers and questions and comments from the audience.